car
This plexiglass Pontiac, from the very earliest days of plastics, was a big hit at the 1939 New York World's Fair; it is shown here doing its star turn in the General Motors pavilion at the 1940 International Columbian Exhibition in San Francisco.
In 2011, it was auctioned by Sotheby's for $308,000. It was still a working automobile at that time, though the plastic chassis (body by Fisher) obviously would not hold up under heavy use. The odometer reading was 86 miles.
"Guest at Sarasota, Florida, trailer park washing his car," according to the notes of photographer Marion Post Wolcott. The picture was taken in 1941; the car is a 1940 Chevy Town Sedan with West Virginia license plates.
A taxi driver on the Greek island of Ikaria made himself a life-sized stone taxi on the wall outside his house.
When gas costs something like $9.50 a gallon, people run out of gas. Last April, this woman was pushing her car (and dog) through a neighborhood in Rome.
About half the pump price of gasoline in Italy is taxes, which have increased recently. Drivers have been driving less, and new car sales declined by 18 percent this year. As demand for gas fell, the price slowly started to drop; last week, a gallon cost only $9.17. Of course Italians buy by the liter, not the gallon, and they use Euros instead of dollars, but it all works out.
The photographer says that after taking the picture, he helped push.
Maybe the gingerbread man was in that Folger's coffee can?
Government photographer John Vachon immortalized this scene while he was doing his Farm Security Administration work in Minnesota and the Dakotas in the spring of 1940. But he didn't record any explanations.
One afternoon in Kathmandu, we saw the men and then the women and then the car, all dressed up with clearly some place special to go. A recent wedding we heard about had twelve hundred guests, but all we saw of this one was the procession on the street, complete with a marching band. The band looked and sounded just like a western marching band and is not pictured here.
Nepalis claim they have more official holidays than any other country on earth. They know how to party.
Leaning against the family's 1955 DeSoto after a summer-vacation day with the leaping dolphins at Marineland, the California boys at right and their cousins from Texas settle back to enjoy an ice cream cone. Except for little brother at far right, who's not enjoying the moment all that much; his ice cream rolled off the cone and plopped down at his feet in the parking lot. . . .
Nothing says the 1950s like jeans rolled up at the bottom and a big DeSoto in a big parking lot.
This 1954 photo was part of a magazine advertisement. Makes me want to buy a Buick, sort of--must be the pearls and the black glove, and that little tiny trunk key.
